curious tomorrows

Over the last four weeks, I spoke at DLD, Tallin and VDS about „Building AI for Europe“ with a key note and on panels and hosted another edition of our “Tech in Action” Dinner series together Steffi Czerny. I remain very bullish on Europe figuring out its way in the age of AI. Here are some of my key reasons:

1) Exceptional founders and talents with bold visions and ambitions

2) AI is the third big wave after the internet and the cloud. In the past, iterators and “late” movers have demonstrated that they can catch up or even win the race

3) New speed of innovation in AI allows companies to scale faster than ever before. It took ChatGPT two months to get to 100m users while Twitter needed 5 years and WhatsApp 3.5 years. The ARR index for AI outperforms the SaaS ARR index by 5x after 20 months

4) Europe has proven that it can build global champions. European businesses need to join forces already much earlier in their lifetime going through venture consolidation. We need more “Airbus“-type of initiatives to build bigger businesses much faster

5) Innovation in power management of chips will reduce the current disadvantage of Europe with regards to access to compute power substantially

VDS Keynote: https://docsend.com/view/au9jx3iscvyier4v

Venture in Europe is way more than the big hubs like Paris, London or Munich. And Valencia is a very good example for that. It is impressive what progress Valencia has been making as a venture hub, in particular under the leadership of mayor Maria José Catalá and Paula Llobet Vilarrasa.

And it is a blueprint what legacy big sports events can leave behind in terms of new infrastructure. In case of Valencia, it is the America’s Cup 2007. Almost every team base around the Americas Cup harbour has been renovated and converted into co-working spaces, office spaces or incubators for venture businesses.

Juan Roig, the owner and president of Mercadona supermarkets, has clearly played an instrumental role with launching the incubator Lanzadera, business school EDEM and seed fund Angels, all located around the harbour. The plans for the El Grau area and building another 90.000sqm of space for the venture ecosystem, both office space and housing, underlines the ambitions of the city government and further strengthening the combination of public and private initiatives.

A big part of it also is Startup Valencia with President Juan Luis Hortelano and his team, Krloos Rivera amongst others. They are the organisation behind Valencia Digital Summit (VDS) and are developing the office ecosystem for startups called “base2” which is located in the former German AC Team base.